It’s not law versus looting, it’s racism versus civil society
On Monday evening, the president went to a church. He had just given a speech threatening to use the U.S. military to police American citizens, and the attorney general had ordered the National Guard to clear peaceful protesters around Lafayette Square, and the police rushed and battered the protesters with tear gas and flash bangs and rubber bullets, to clear the way. Episcopalian priests were there, too, handing out food and water. They were tear-gassed, too.
It was reported the president had his feelings hurt by reports about being rushed to the White House bunker during protests on Friday night. As a Donald Trump adviser told the Washington Post, “It was just to win the news cycle.” Some moments demand you take a side. The pandemic has been one, strangely, and most people have taken the side of public health, of being a society.
Pandemics are a mirror: they show the systems for what they are, and reveal nations and communities and individuals, too.
“Epidemics expose both our dark and our lighter natures,” says Frank Snowden, a Yale professor who has written extensively about the history of epidemics and society. “So the question that is happening now is whether people will be able to see the realities of their societies, and react in a rational way.”
On Monday, the director of America’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the most trusted voice in America on the coronavirus pandemic that has killed over 107,000 Americans, said he hadn’t spoken to the president in two weeks. The pandemic has forced us to expand our imaginations. It has forced us to recognize just how bad things are, and to consider how bad they can get.
The protests are that, too, as is this president. The Black Lives Matter protests across America were sparked by the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis on May 25; they are based on the fact that racism and police brutality is systemic and endemic, a tragedy for generations. On this issue, it has always been this: if you do not take a side, you are taking a side.
But the side isn’t law and order versus looting. It’s not order versus chaos. It has become authoritarianism and racism versus the rest of civil society. That’s all.
Say what it is. Look it in the eye. Protests can mask individual actors, but across America certain themes are clear. Police have created conflict in cities across America. Police have deliberately targeted journalists who have clearly identified themselves, who are filming them on live TV.
And the president has responded by pushing for authoritarian control, based on a largely imaginary national terrorist threat called Antifa, a loosely anarchic group with no national leadership.
Attorney General William Barr called it “domestic terrorism,” as did the acting head of Customs and Border Patrol. On Sunday, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper said “I think the sooner that you mass and dominate the battlespace, the quicker this dissipates and we can get back to the right normal.” Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, a decorated Afghanistan war veteran, tweeted that the government should call in the 101st Airborne, and “if necessary, the 10th Mountain, 82nd Airborne, 1st Cav, 3rd Infantry — whatever it takes to restore order. No quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters.”
After Trump’s stunt, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa said, “It’s all assumed to be peaceful until someone that’s got a terrorist activity or a rioting activity, you don’t know that until it happens.” Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas was asked if he had seen an abuse of power, and he said, “by the protesters, yes.”
It is clear that through a blend of incompetence and malice, enabled by state media and a failed state of a political party, this American government has aligned itself along traditional fascist lines. Stack the courts, attack the free press, hollow out the institutions. Umberto Eco grew up in Mussolini’s Italy, and wrote down his characteristics of
Ur-Fascism in 1995: the cult of tradition, the rejection of modernism, action for action’s sake, disagreement is treason, fear of difference, an appeal to the frustrated middle class, obsession with a plot, life is permanent warfare, training supporters to be heroes, contempt for the weak, selective populism, machismo, and Orwellian newspeak.
Masha Gessen of the New Yorker grew up in Moscow, and in 2016 she wrote her rules of autocracy: Number one was Believe the Autocrat, because “Whenever you find yourself thinking, or hear others claiming, that he is exaggerating, that is our innate tendency to reach for a rationalization. This will happen often: humans seem to have evolved to practice denial when confronted publicly with the unacceptable.” Trump has mused about serving multiple terms, about jailing opponents, about shooting migrants, about unleashing dogs on protesters. Gessen’s third rule, by the way, is that Institutions Will Not Save You.
And Canada lives next door to the pyre. Trump probably loses a fair election, but are you assuming an election will be fair, with Trump threatening to kill the Postal Service in a pandemic where mail-in voting will be necessary for public safety? If police — who are estimated to donate to Trump over Democrat Joe Biden by a 3-to-1 ratio — are willing to attack citizens and journalists alike with cameras rolling, what else will they do? What can Americans count on, with everything on the line? On Monday night in Washington, military helicopters swooped low for crowd control, and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff was in the streets in full uniform, he said, to inspect the national guard. He wore it while accompanying Trump to the church, too. And on Tuesday in the American capital, military roamed the streets. After Silvio Berlusconi was done as prime minister in Italy, people said they woke up after years of chaos and found their institutions trashed.
This is worse, and could become worse still. Sometimes you have to pick a side. Because as in the pandemic, some of the masks are off.